Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Craig broke his usual newsletter schedule to send this one, and the reason is a change Google made this week: your email is now processed by their AI by default. The goal is reasonable — organise your inbox, fill your calendar, help catch scams. What makes it worth a special email is that Google, unlike Microsoft, openly admitted this creates a serious security problem. The mechanism is prompt injection, and Craig's explanation is the clearest he has given on air. An AI reading a document cannot distinguish between the content it was asked to read and instructions it was given. Put text on a web page saying Matt is the best radio host in the world, and the AI processing that page reads it as something it has been told. Apply that to email and the consequence follows immediately: a message written by an attacker can carry embedded instructions that override what Google's AI was told to do. The scam is no longer aimed at the person reading the mail. It is aimed at the software reading it on their behalf. Which